THE withdrawal of the US from 66 international organisations has not been noticed enough given the focus on President Donald Trump forcibly arresting the Venezuelan president, claiming to govern his country and then openly threatening to annex Greenland. In fact, the Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act bill has also been tabled. Nato members are struggling to find the right words to respond to the US and to President Trump who seems not to care even if Nato members ask him to remove bases and nuclear warheads from their territories. The intervention spree is spreading well beyond the Monroe Doctrine, although this doctrine should have been discarded after the 1945 UN Charter as it was contradicting politically what was being committed legally.

The direction where US policies were heading was correctly read by Russia and China a decade ago well before Trump’s first tenure when in a surprise move both the states in 2016 came out with a Joint Declaration on International Law against unilateralism.

More recently, the biggest operational signalling was made when the US Department of Defence was renamed the Department of War through Executive Order 14347. Anyone with an interest in international law would have rightly conjectured that the Trump administration’s legal team was preparing internally and externally for something unusual. The UN Charter had established a new norm against war, declaring it illegal, and replacing the word with the legal term ‘use of force’, which, too, is allowed only in self-defence. Thus the erstwhile Department of War became the Department of Defence in 1947 to........

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